‘GameFi is going to be the next big thing’

Coinhead Derek Rose
GameFi

The GameFi project "Busta" features a progressive jackpot and a rocket ship. (Supplied)

Could an Autumn of GameFi follow last year’s Summer of Defi? Some are betting on the merger of decentralised finance and gaming as the hot new trend.

Play-to-earn blockchain game Axie Infinity has yield farming elements. Optimised yield farm platform Beefy Finance last month launched a lottery-like prize pool, Moonpot.

Other decentralised exchanges are trying to make the drudgery of yield farming fun, like DinoSwap, which announced earlier this month it had become the third-biggest defi platform on Polygon just two weeks after launch. It credited in part “unique gamification opportunities” on the platform such as “Extinction Pools” for token staking.

And of course, leading Binance Smart Chain exchange PancakeSwap has its own gamification elements with its “syrup pools” and lotteries, as does ShibaSwap.

The Tron Foundation earlier this month partnered with APENFT and WINKLink to launch a $300 million incubator, TRON Arcade.

“GameFi is going to be the next big thing that makes the DeFi, NFT, and larger crypto space easy to understand and be involved in,” Tron founder Justin Sun said in the announcement.

The term is believed to have originated with a tweet last year from Andre Cronje, the founder of blue-chip crypto project Yearn.Finance.

‘So much untapped potential’

BUSTaCRASH
Supplied/BUSTaCRASH

“Neil Apestrong,” the project lead of BUSTA, whose token sale will launch later today on crypto launchpad Starter, sees the trend intensifying.

“We are taking iGaming and DeFi to the next level, as there’s just so much untapped potential with the technology available that people aren’t utilising yet,” “Apestrong” said in an announcement.

“We’ve taken advantage of that and intricately designed our ecosystem in a way that makes our games fun and rewarding to play, incentivises holding and staking our $BUST token, and allows our community to grow exponentially.”

The Binance Smart Chain project is trying to be a complete gamified finance ecosystem, featuring games such as a progressive jackpot lottery, its own yield farm and referral rewards.

Users who don’t want to play games will essentially “be the house,” as the jackpots will feature a “house edge” that is distributed back to the tokenholders in the form of rewards.

Its signature game at the moment is BUSTaCRASH, in which users earn increasing rewards as a rocket ship flies into the sky. But if they don’t claim their winnings before it crashes, they lose their bet.

There’s also Dogemon Go, a smartphone augmented reality game that’s kind of a cross between Pokemon Go and Dogecoin.

By catching “Dogemon,” players earn DOGO credits that they can swap for DOGO tokens on the Binance Smart Chain.

“The Dogemons are waiting for you – Start Now and catch them all!,” its website reads.

The project appears to have just launched last month.

Other GameFi projects include Safe Hamsters, a gamified yield farm; YooShi, a launchpad for GameFi projects; DungeonSwap, another gamified yield farm; and Multigame, an NFT platform and GameFi launchpad.

Would-be investors should exercise caution — the open-source nature of cryptocurrency has made it easy for people with a bit of technical know-how to clone other projects and launch them as new undertakings with just minor tweaks to the protocol. While some of these derivative projects succeed, the majority never take off.

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